The trick is that there’s two tiers of expensive for GA:
- People buying, say, a new SR22 for $779,000
- People buying, say, a 1976 Cessna 172 for $72,000 and splitting it with 3 friends
Having Cirrus work on, say, regular Mogas by contracting Continental to develop a new engine would be expensive but the buyers aren’t particularly price sensitive and amortized across the typical lifetime of an aviation engine design (the IO-550 in the SR22 was first delivered in 1983) likely wouldn’t hurt much.
Trying to come up with an engine swap for the O-320 in that ‘76 172 is a whole other can of worms. Who’s going to even sign off on it? The whole aircraft is 50 years old and designed and certificated for that specific engine. There’s no financial incentive for Cessna to do it, and even if they did, the cost to do the swap would likely significantly exceed the financial capacity of many owners.
I absolutely would love to see a financially viable way to get past this! The use of LL fuel in 2022 is tragic. On the other hand, killing off a big chunk of the GA industry and leaving it solely in the purview of the Wealthy and not just dedicated hobbyists… that sucks.
For context, my family has an old Piper J3 sitting in a hangar on a farm. It definitely needs an overhaul, but to get it back in the air would likely be a low 5-figure bill; retrofitting a Mogas engine onto it in such a way that it doesn’t need to be categorized as “experimental” would be… prohibitive.